Howard Lutnick was emphatic. In an October interview with the New York PostTrump's commerce secretary dramatically asserted that after a single encounter with the disgraced financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, he was determined to “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
…Unless he was on a yacht near Epstein's island and needed a place to stop for lunch.
On Tuesday, Lutnick confirmed that he, his wife, four children, their nannies, and another family dined with Epstein at his home on Little St. James while on vacation in 2012 — as suggested by an email from Lutnick to Epstein in the latest tranche of files released by the DOJ. The island visit came after Epstein had already been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.
“I did have lunch with him as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “My wife was with me as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple with their children. And we had lunch on the island. That is true. For an hour. And we left with all of my children.”
Lutnik added that he “did not have any relationship” with Epstein. “I barely had anything to do with that person,” he said.
Emails released by the Justice Department earlier this month suggest that Lutnick severely mischaracterized his relationship with Epstein when he was speaking to the Post last year. In his October interview, Lutnick described in vivid detail his experience of meeting Epstein alongside his wife after they moved into the house next door to Epstein's infamous Upper East Side row house in 2005.
“My wife and I go next door. We walk seven steps right to the next house for coffee [and he opens the doors to the living room] and there's a massage table in the middle of the room and candles all around and stuff,” Lutnick recalls with the air of a girlfriend who has some particularly juicy gossip to share over lunch.
“So — I ask very insightful, cutting questions — I say to him, 'Massage table in the middle of your house, how often do you have a massage?' And he says, 'every day.' And then he gets weirdly close to me, and he says, 'and the right kind of massage.' Now my wife is standing here, so she looks at me, and I look at her, and we say, 'I'm sorry. We have to go.' And we left,” Lutnick added.
“In the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” the commerce secretary declared. “So I was never in the room with him, socially for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn't going because he's gross.”
But the documents the DOJ released this month contain dozens of mentions of Lutnick's name, and suggest that not only did Lutnick and Epstein repeatedly interact in the years after the financier's 2009 conviction, including when Lutnick worked to arrange the visit to Epstein's island.
The emails detail coordination between the two men and their assistants to set up phone calls over the course of several years, including in 2009 and 2011. They indicate that Lutnick and Epstein made plans to have drinks at Epstein's home in May 2011, that Epstein contributed financially to a 2017 event honoring Lutnick, and that in 2015 Lutnick invited Epstein to what was described as an “intimate” fundraising event for then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Lutnick insisted in his Tuesday testimony that he had only met Epstein in person two or three times over the course of a decade, but as Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said during the hearing, “The issue is not that you engaged in any wrongdoing in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, but that you totally misrepresented the extent of your relationship with him to the Congress, to the American people and to the survivors of his despicable criminal and predatory acts.”
“You told us when you first encountered Epstein in 2005, you vowed never to step foot in the same room with him again,” Van Hollen added. “You had interactions with Epstein over the next 13 years, long after he was convicted in 2008. That calls into question your fitness for the job you hold.”
The debacle has led to bipartisan calls for Lutnick's resignation. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said in a weekend interview with CNN that the commerce secretary should just “make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign.”
“I mean, there are three people in Great Britain that have resigned in politics,” Massie added, pointing to how other nations have managed to force accountability on their public officials in a way that has escaped the United States.
Trump's allies in Congress are circling the wagons. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the suggestion that Lutnick resigns “absurd.”
“He's done an extraordinary job for the country,” Johnson added, advising Massie and others to “stop playing political games.”
